{"id":42649,"date":"2025-09-12T15:32:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T19:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/?page_id=42649"},"modified":"2026-01-30T10:23:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T15:23:39","slug":"cgsw-12-0","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/cgsw-12-0\/","title":{"rendered":"CGSW 12.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

CISE Graduate Student Workshop (CGSW 12.0)<\/span>
\n<\/strong>Event Date:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>Friday, January 30, 2026<\/span>
\nLocation<\/strong>: 8 St. Mary’s St, PHO 906<\/span><\/p>\n

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Vote here.<\/a><\/strong>
\nCGSW 12.0 Agenda<\/a>.<\/strong>
\nRegister to attend CGSW 12.0 here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

CGSW is an annual forum that provides students the opportunity to share their original research and hone their communication skills in an engaging, collaborative environment. Organized by students, for students<\/strong>, the day-long event encourages interdisciplinary sharing among affiliated students, faculty, and invited guest speakers across diverse application areas. The event concludes with an awards reception at The Castle on Bay State Road, where students are recognized for best presentations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Keynote Speakers:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Talk Title: From Hubris to Hope When It’s Agents All the Way Down<\/b><\/b><\/div>\n
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We are in a moment of hope, hype, and hubris. AI is solving some of the toughest problems, from Math Olympiads to self-driving cars, while simultaneously failing at the simplest tasks.\u00a0E<\/span>very software application will be agentic – using the word loosely to include the universe of GenAI integrations. But what happens when we move beyond the demo? What does the architecture look like when it really is “agents all the way down”\u2014a recursive stack of probabilistic models interacting with deterministic systems?\u00a0 To run, scale, and manage the software to come, we need to adapt, invent and adopt computing platforms to treat GenAI models, tools, and agents in a first-class way and not as a shiny object in an ivory tower. In this talk, Rania will share her experience from 20+ years building AI native platforms, with a focus on Agentic AI, to talk about the path from the hubris of “magic” tools to the hope of creating meaningful value through a focus on system design, integration and architectural principles<\/span><\/div>\n

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Dr. Rania\u00a0Khalaf<\/strong>\u00a0is Chief AI Officer at WSO2 and a global AI and cloud leader with a track record of driving innovation and building diverse, high-performing teams. Previously, she was CIO and Chief Data Officer at Inari, where she built data and AI-driven capabilities for food security and sustainability. As Director of AI Engineering and Distinguished Scientist at IBM Research, she advanced AI and cloud innovations, delivering them into open source, and to products in Watson and the IBM Cloud. She holds Bachelor\u2019s and Master\u2019s degrees from MIT and a PhD from the University of Stuttgart.\u00a0Rania<\/span>\u00a0serves on academic and industry boards, driving impact in AI, sustainability, and education, including the iPark Incubator at the American University of Beirut and the\u00a0Hariri Institute at Boston University.<\/div>\n

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Talk Title: Multi-Agent Coordination in Extremely Dense Environments<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amazon recently announced the deployment of its 1-millionth warehouse robot to its ever-expanding and evolving fulfillment network.\u00a0 To maximize returns on this enormous investment, Amazon Robotics engineers and scientists continue to identify optimizations in system software that would allow customers\u2019 orders to be fulfilled cheaper, faster, and more reliably.\u00a0 In this talk, we will discuss the Block Rearrangement Problem (BRaP), a challenging component of large warehouse management which involves rearranging storage blocks within dense grids to achieve a desired goal state. We formally define the BRaP as a graph search problem and propose a search-based algorithm that leverages state-of-the-art methods in multi-agent path finding. Despite the exponential relation between search space size and block number which renders classical methods from configuration space search inapplicable, our method demonstrates high efficiency in creating rearrangement plans for deeply buried blocks in up to 80×80 grids.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rahul<\/span>\u00a0Chandan<\/strong> is a research scientist on the Mobile Robotics team at Amazon Robotics in North Reading, MA. Previously, he received a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2017, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara in 2019, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, also from UCSB, in 2022 under the supervision of Jason R. Marden, where he was awarded the CCDC Best PhD Thesis Award.\u00a0 His research interests include game theory, optimization and control theory, and their applications to engineered and societal systems.\u00a0 Outside of work,\u00a0Rahul<\/span>\u00a0enjoys exploring the world through travel, food, and books.<\/span><\/p>\n

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CISE Alumni-Faculty Panelists:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Burak Aksar<\/a>,<\/strong> Spiky.AI, Co-founder and CTO
\nMela Coffey<\/strong><\/a>, Draper, Senior Member of Technical Staff
\nAjay Joshi<\/strong><\/a>, Boston University Professor (ECE), CipherSonic Labs Inc., Co-founder and CEO
\nAlyssa Pierson<\/strong><\/a>, Boston University University Assistant Professor (ME), Ava Robotics, Chief Scientist
\nJimmy Queeney<\/strong>,<\/a> Research Scientist, Amazon Robotics<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

CGSW 12.0 Student Host Organizer Team<\/span>: Abin Binoy George<\/a><\/strong> (PhD Candidate, ECE), Beste Oztop<\/a><\/strong> (PhD Candidate, ECE), Kamran Vakil<\/a><\/strong> (PhD Candidate, ME), <\/span>Zeynep Ece Kizilates<\/strong><\/a> (PhD Candidate, ECE).<\/p>\n

Learn about past events\u00a0<\/span>here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CISE Graduate Student Workshop (CGSW 12.0) Event Date:\u00a0Friday, January 30, 2026 Location: 8 St. Mary’s St, PHO 906 Vote here. CGSW 12.0 Agenda. Register to attend CGSW 12.0 here. CGSW is an annual forum that provides students the opportunity to share their original research and hone their communication skills in an engaging, collaborative environment. Organized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18553,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42649"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18553"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42649"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43226,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42649\/revisions\/43226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}